Culture and Globalization

Week 1: Intro I

Week 2: Intro II

How are uses of the internet, especially user-generated and social media, changing our political landscape? Does political revolution today need the internet? Are there limits to what “online” revolutions can produce?

Week 3: History I

What do we mean by “globalization” and how is it useful as a concept? What are the links to imperialism, and colonialism? What does a world economy include?

Week 4: History II

What are relationships between the political changes (from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries) to the structures of capitalism? How can we link back our understanding modern globalization to earlier periods of empire?

Week 5: Space and Place I

What are ways that urban spaces reflect the economic structures of globalization? In what ways might cities make those economics possible?

Week 6: Space and Place II

Week 7: Flows I

What are some of the relationships between national identity and global flows (of money and military, for example)? What understanding of immigration and immigrant identity do we get when we center analyses of sexuality and gender in addition to race?

Week 8: Midterm Exam

Week 9: Flows II

Week 10: Prisons I

What does the term “prison-industrial complex” describe? How is it a useful concept, or not? What has driven the expansion of prisons and imprisoned populations over the past few decades? What are the relationships between prison growth, crime, and safety? What role does economics play, and how does the concept of globalization help us understand this role?

Week 11: Prisons II

Why do we have prisons? How is the history of the prison linked to the long history of globalization? What would happen if we didn’t have prisons?

Week 12: Paper Workshops

Week 13: GMU Holiday

Week 14: The End of Capitalism?

Week 15: Course Wrap-Up